Open Source and Standards

According to the Open Source Initiative, an institution dedicated to promoting the use of Open Source software, ‘Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in'. In addition to the benefits of using open source, the use of standards further supports interoperability, ensures software maintainability and helps avoiding vendor lock-in by removing dependence on proprietary solutions. IMC Technologies is not only committed to using open source, standards-compliant software for its products and services, but is also an active contributor to the respective communities.

Our expertise

Some of the things we do well and some of the technologies we use for this are:

Application Development: We base most of our application development efforts on the J2EE stack of technologies and standards, built on the Java language. This stack covers virtually every aspect of application development and offers reliability, security, performance and cross-platform support, while being backed by industry-wide committees and expert groups and used in most enterprise environments worldwide.

Portal and Collaboration Software: We have extensive knowledge of Liferay, one of the world's leading portal frameworks that offers reliability, flexibility and an open architecture that is suited to covering virtually any requirement. We have also developed and contributed the Liferay Linked Data Module that generated great interest and feedback in the community and will soon be featured in the main distribution of the software.

Semantics and Reasoning: We are strongly committed to following and implementing development and standardization efforts in the fields of Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web and we have significant know-how and experience in a number of semantic standards, methodologies and tools that we apply throughout our projects. Most notably, we make extensive use of OWL, RDF(S), SPARQL, Protégé (for which we also have implemented some extensions), SWRL, Sesame, Jena and Pellet.

Search and retrieval: In addition to semantics-based search, we are also proficient with more traditional forms of retrieval including full-text indexing and retrieval with Lucene and search using OpenSearch.

What our use of standards based open source software means for you

Reduced cost: Using open source software means the licensing fees are minimized, thus allowing for lower overall cost and allocating more resources where needed.

Better products and services: Open source software is developed via an open and collaborative process, which means that its outcome is scrutinized, tested and improved upon repeatedly by groups of developers. This process generates software that is reliable and performs well – the kind of software we like to use for our products and services.

Flexibility and maintainability: Having access to the source code of the infrastructure that we use, in combination with our extensive know-how and skills means that we are in the position to not only customize the software according to our needs, but also to intervene where necessary to take corrective or fine-tuning action.

Interoperability and best-of-breed selection: Through the use of standards, our suite of tools and solutions are able to integrate on the data and functionality level not only with each other, but also with the majority of software and systems typically used in any enterprise environment. Thus, we are able to choose from a rich arsenal of tools the ones that are best suited for each task and make sure they all work seamlessly to provide the best possible solution for our clients.